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The Puppet Masters
 About the Book
About The Movie
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Preview
Chapter 1
Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don´t know and I don´t know how we can ever find out. I´m not a lab man; I´m an operator.
With the Soviets it seems certain that they did not invent anything. They simply took the communist power-for-power´s-sake and extended it without any "rotten liberal sentimentality" as the commissars put it. On the other hand, with animals they were a good deal more than animal.
(It seems strange no longer to see dogs around. When we finally come to grips with them, there will be a few million dogs to avenge. And cats. For me, one particular cat.)
If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them which is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race.
For me it started much too early on July 12, ´07, with my phone shrilling in a frequency guaranteed to peel off the skull. I felt around my person, trying to find the thing to shut it off, then recalled that I had left it in my jacket across the room. "All right," I growled. "I hear you. Shut off that damned noise."
"Emergency," a voice said in my ear. "Report in person."
I told him what to do with his emergency. "I´m on a seventy-two-hour pass."
"Report to the Old Man," the voice persisted, "at once."
That was different. "Moving," I acknowledged and sat up with a jerk that hurt my eyeballs. I found myself facing a blonde. She was sitting up, too, and staring at me round-eyed.
"Who are you talking to?" she demanded.
I stared back, recalling with difficulty that I had seen her before. "Me? Talking?" I stalled while trying to think up a good lie, then, as I came wider awake, realized that it did not have to be a very good lie as she could not possibly have heard the other half of the conversation. The sort of phone my section uses is not standard; the audio relay was buried surgically under the skin back of my left ear-bone conduction. "Sorry, babe," I went on. "Had a nightmare. I often talk in my sleep."
"Sure you´re all right?"
"I´m fine, now that I´m awake," I assured her, staggering a bit as I stood up. "You go back to sleep."
"Well, uh-" She was breathing regularly almost at once. I went into the bath, injected a quarter grain of "Gyro" in my arm, then let the vibro shake me apart for three minutes while the drug put me back together. I stepped out a new man, or at least a good mock-up of one, and got my jacket. The blonde was snoring gently.
I let my subconscious race back along its track and realized with regret that I did not owe her a durned thing, so I left her. There was nothing in the apartment to give me away, nor even to tell her who I was.
I entered our section offices through a washroom booth in MacArthur Station. You won´t find our offices in the phone lists. In fact, it does not exist. Probably I don´t exist either. All is illusion. Another route is through a little hole-in-the-wall shop with a sign reading RARE STAMPS & COINS. Don´t try that route either-they´ll try to sell you a Tu´penny Black.
Don´t try any route. I told you we didn´t exist, didn´t I?
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